Elena Pisareva:
A Biographical Sketch

(Based on works in the references and
private communications from Leonid Danilov,
Gvido Trepsha, and Konstantin Zaitzev)

Elena Fedorovna Pisareva was an early member of and
worker for the Theosophical Society in Russia. She was
born in 1855 into an upper-class Russian family, not far from
Moscow, and died in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 4, 1944,
in her ninetieth year.

At the age of seventeen, she went to Germany, where she
studied pedagogy at Heidelberg University and formed a close
attachment to German culture, which influenced her later
Theosophical work. When she returned to Russia, she married
Nikolai Pisarev, a member of the landed gentry who was
active in social work.

In 1901, Pisareva contacted Theosophy, joined the
Theosophical Society by the following year, and at once
became active in propagating Theosophy in Russia. She was
acquainted with many of the leading Theosophists of Europe,
but was associated particularly with the German Theosophical
Society, being an admirer of Rudolf Steiner and a promoter of
his work in Russia. Steiner, however, had personal ambitions to
form a separate organization and seems early to have been
moving in that direction. His formal break with the
Theosophical Society came when he refused to let members of
the German Theosophical Society be members also of the
Order of the Star in the East (which was promoting J.
Krishnamurti). Therefore, he was expelled from the Society
for violating its policy of freedom of thought and membership,
after which he founded the Anthroposophical Society.
Pisareva, however, remained with the Theosophical
Society. The leading figure in Russian Theosophy at this time
was Anna Alekseyevna Kamensky (see Zaitzev and Duguay),
with whom Pisareva was linked for the rest of her life and
whom she admired deeply.

The Pisarevs’ country estate, some thirty miles from the
city of Kaluga on the Oka River about a hundred miles southwest
of Moscow, became a center of Theosophical life during
the summers. The rest of the year, meetings were held at
the Pisarevs’ house in Kaluga, where Elena founded and led
a Lodge, which, although small in membership, was the second
most influential one in Russia, after St. Petersburg. Her
husband, Nikolai, was the Secretary of the Lodge and the first
Theosophical publisher through his press, the Logos
Publishing Company, which operated for a dozen years, from
1905 to 1917, after which it was closed by the Communist
government. Elena Pisareva had contact with various
Russians of intellectual and spiritual distinction, including
Leo Tolstoy, whom she and Anna Kamensky visited in 1908,
and also with Nicholas Roerich, the artist.

Pisareva produced a respectable volume of literary writings.
She became an energetic translator of Theosophical literature
into Russian. She also wrote a Russian biography of
H.P. Blavatsky (Elena Petrovna Blavatskaya: Biograficheskii
Ocherk), two chapters of which were published in English
translation in the Theosophist magazine. She wrote many pamphlets
in Russian, some of which were collected and published
as a book, O Skrytom Smyslie Zhizni (On the Hidden
Meaning of Life), for which she was awarded the Subba Rao
Medal in 1934. She was also author of a number of articles in
English.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in October/November of
1917, life in Russia became increasingly difficult for Pisareva. In
1922, she fled to Italy, where some other Russian expatriates
had also settled. She continued her literary Theosophical work
and her Esoteric School activities there. She and Anna
Kamensky were the most prominent figures in the Russian
Theosophical Society outside Russia. Her last published translation
into Russian was George Arundale’s book Mount Everest:
its Spiritual Attainment, of which copies are rare. Her last original
work was a manuscript history of the Theosophical Society
in Russia, published here for the first time.

The fullest and most detailed history of Theosophy in
pre-Communist Russia is “No Religion Higher than Truth”: A
History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922, by
Maria Carlson. That book has many, albeit mostly minor,
errors of fact. It also engages in a fair amount of editorializing,
some explicit, much subliminal, typical of the academic
style of scholars who treat a subject from which they need to
distance themselves professionally. Despite those weaknesses,
Carlson’s volume has no peer.

Pisareva’s history is of another kind altogether. It is a
first-hand account by a principal actor in the history. It gives
an insider’s view of how Theosophy came to Russia and
developed there. Much of it is focused admiringly on the role
of Anna Alexeyevna Kamensky, a leading figure in Russian
Theosophy, and also on that of Anna’s colleague Cecile
Helmboldt (Tsetselia Gelmboldt). Because of the sudden disruption
in the growth of the Russian Theosophical Society
after the Revolution, the story is in some respects a sad one.
Yet is it infused with Elena Pisareva’s enthusiasm, dedication,
and personal insights.